Moving day: Patients relocated to new Javon Bea Hospital in Rockford

Saturday

ROCKFORD — For the first time in more than two months, Megan and Branden Johnson are able to spend the night with their newborn twins in the boys' hospital room.

Saturday was moving day at Mercyhealth’s Javon Bea Hospital and Physician Clinic on Rockton Avenue, and the Johnsons’ twins were the first two Neonatal Intensive Care Unit patients moved to a new hospital across town. They left the Rockton Avenue hospital at 5 a.m. and arrived at Mercyhealth’s Javon Bea Hospital and Physician Clinic-Riverside a short time later.

The boys now have a private room instead of the multi-person pod they were in on Rockton Avenue.

“We’re going on 10 weeks with them (hospitalized) and we’ve never spent a full night with them,” Megan Johnson said of her premie boys, who were born one minute apart on Oct. 31. “Tonight we will do that.”

Mercyhealth's new, $505 million hospital, 8201 E. Riverside Blvd., overlooks Interstate 90 and rolling fields. Construction began in 2016. The new hospital has 194 beds on 263 acres, while the Rockton Avenue hospital has 94 beds. The new location is the only state-designated children’s hospital in an 11-county swath of northern Illinois, and has the only Level II pediatric trauma emergency room in the same region.

“This hospital is for the sickest of the sick patients,” said Javon R. Bea, president and CEO of Rockford-based Mercyhealth.

Starting hours before sunrise, hospital staff and ambulance crews shuttled 123 patients from the Rockton Avenue hospital to the Riverside location. Ambulance after ambulance could be seen traveling on Riverside Boulevard on Saturday morning.

NICU Nurse Manager Pam Allen said hospital staff have been planning for the move for more than a year, although “we’re used to moving babies.” Hospital officials said employees spent more than 200 hours training for the move.

“It is going really smoothly,” Allen said.

It went so smoothly for Landen and Emerson Johnson — now 7 ½ pounds each after they were born at just under 3 pounds — that the identical twins slept through much of their trips, their parents said. Branden Johnson, 29, said “it was a little scary this morning seeing them” readied for transport. Landen was born first, and was transported first.